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1. Expertise Across Disciplines: Establishing Common Ground in Interdisciplinary Disaster Research Teams

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13407  

   Gilligan, Jonathan M. ( September 2019 , Risk Analysis)

   Hazards and disasters arise from interactions between environmental and social processes, so interdisciplinary research is crucial in understanding and effectively managing them. Despite support and encouragement from funding agencies, universities, and journals and growing interest from researchers, interdisciplinary disaster research teams face significant obstacles, such as the difficulty of establishing effective communication and understanding across disciplines. Better understanding of interdisciplinary teamwork can also have important practical benefits for operational disaster planning and response.

   Social studies of science distinguish different kinds of expertise and different modes of communication. Understanding these differences can help interdisciplinary research teams communicate more clearly and work together more effectively. The primary role of a researcher is incontributory expertise(the ability to make original contributions to a discipline); butinteractional expertisein other disciplines (the ability to understand their literature and communicate with their practitioners) can play an important role in interdisciplinary collaborations. Developing interactional expertise requires time and effort, which can be challenging for a busy researcher, and also requires a foundation of trust and communication among team members. Three distinct aspects of communication play important roles in effective interdisciplinary communication:dialects,metaphors, andarticulation. There are different ways to develop interactional expertise and effective communication, so researchers can pursue approaches that suit their circumstances. It will be important for future research on interdisciplinary disaster research to identify best practices for building trust, facilitating communication, and developing interactional expertise.

    

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2. Interdisciplinary Theory, Methods, and Approaches for Hazards and Disaster Research: An Introduction to the Special Issue

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13777  

   Peek, Lori ; Guikema, Seth ( June 2021 , Risk Analysis)

   What is interdisciplinary research? Why is it vital to the advancement of the field of hazards and disaster research? What theory, methods, and approaches are fundamental to interdisciplinary research projects and their applications? This article addresses these and other pressing questions by taking stock of recent advancements in interdisciplinary studies of hazards and disasters. It also introduces the special issue ofRisk Analysis, which includes this introductory article and 25 original perspectives papers meant to highlight new trends and applications in the field. The papers were written following two National Science Foundation‐supported workshops that were organized in response to the growing interest in interdisciplinary hazards and disaster research, the increasing number of interdisciplinary funding opportunities and collaborations in the field, and the need for more rigorous guidance for interdisciplinary researchers and research teams. This introductory article and the special collection are organized around the cross‐cutting themes of theory, methods, approaches, interdisciplinary research projects, and applications to advance interdisciplinarity in hazards and disaster research.

    

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3. Stories for Interdisciplinary Disaster Research Collaboration

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13424  

   Moezzi, Mithra ; Peek, Lori ( November 2019 , Risk Analysis)

   What if we used the stories that researchers and practitioners tell each other as tools to advance interdisciplinary disaster research? This article hypothesizes that doing so could foster a new mode of collaborative learning and discovery. People, including researchers, regularly tell stories to relate “what happened” based on their experience, often in ways that augment or contradict existing understandings. These stories provide naturalistic descriptions of context, complexity, and dynamic relationships in ways that formal theories, static data, and interpretations of findings can miss. They often do so memorably and engagingly, which makes them beneficial to researchers across disciplines and allows them to be integrated into their own work. Seeking out, actively inviting, sharing, and discussing these stories in interdisciplinary teams that have developed a strong sense of trust can therefore provide partial escape from discipline‐specific reasoning and frameworks that are so often unconsciously employed. To develop and test this possibility, this article argues that the diverse and rapidly growing hazards and disaster field needs to incorporate a basic theoretical understanding of stories, building from folkloristics and other sources. It would also need strategies to draw out and build from stories in suitable interdisciplinary research forums and, in turn, to find ways to incorporate the discussions that emanate from stories into ongoing analyses, interpretations, and future lines of interdisciplinary inquiry.

    

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4. Critical Time, Space, and Decision‐Making Agent Considerations in Human‐Centered Interdisciplinary Hurricane‐Related Research

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13380  

   Murray‐Tuite, Pamela ; Ge, Y. Gurt ; Zobel, Christopher ; Nateghi, Roshanak ; Wang, Haizhong ( July 2019 , Risk Analysis)

   In hazard and disaster contexts, human‐centered approaches are promising for interdisciplinary research since humans and communities feature prominently in many definitions of disaster and the built environment is designed and constructed by humans to serve their needs. With a human‐centered approach, the decision‐making agent becomes a critical consideration. This article discusses and illustrates the need for alignment of decision‐making agents, time, and space for interdisciplinary research on hurricanes, particularly evacuation and the immediate aftermath. We specifically consider the fields of sociobehavioral science, transportation engineering, power systems engineering, and decision support systems in this context. These disciplines have historically adopted different decision‐making agents, ranging from individuals to households to utilities and government agencies. The fields largely converged to the local level for studies’ spatial scales, with some extensions based on the physical construction and operation of some systems. Greater discrepancy across the fields is found in the frequency of data collection, which ranges from one time (e.g., surveys) to continuous monitoring systems (e.g., sensors). Resolving these differences is important for the success of interdisciplinary teams in protective‐action‐related disaster research.

    

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5. The Frontiers of Uncertainty Estimation in Interdisciplinary Disaster Research and Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13337  

   Nateghi, Roshanak ; Sutton, Jeannette ; Murray‐Tuite, Pamela ( May 2019 , Risk Analysis)

   Conceptualizing, assessing, and managing disaster risks involve collecting and synthesizing pluralistic information—from natural, built, and human systems—to characterize disaster impacts and guide policy on effective resilience investments. Disaster research and practice, therefore, are highly complex and inherently interdisciplinary endeavors. Characterizing the uncertainties involved in interdisciplinary disaster research is imperative, since misrepresenting uncertainty can lead to myopic decisions and suboptimal societal outcomes. Efficacious disaster mitigation should, therefore, explicitly address the uncertainties associated with all stages of hazard modeling, preparation, and response. However, uncertainty assessment and communication in the context of interdisciplinary disaster research remain understudied. In this “Perspective” article, we argue that in harnessing interdisciplinary methods and diverse data types in disaster research, careful deliberations on assessingType IIIandType IVerrors are imperative. Additionally, we discuss the pathologies in frequentist approaches, calling for an increasing role for Bayesian methods in uncertainty estimations. Moreover, we discuss the potential tradeoffs associated with information and uncertainty, calling for deliberate consideration of the role of diversity of information prior to setting the scope in interdisciplinary modeling. Future research guided by further reflections on the ideas raised in this article could help push the frontiers of uncertainty estimation in interdisciplinary hazard research and practice.

    

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